`You Loved Life's Dailiness'

In “Haydn and Hokusai” (Belonging: Poems, 2002), Dick Davis invokes and praises, as in prayer, two “masters of wit and line”: 

“Haydn and Hokusai,

Be with me now, lighten

My lumpen moods, drive off

Ungainly panics, spleen.

Purge me of selfish torpor;

Remind me that you loved

Life’s dailiness, its quirks

And frumpish joy; and that

If there is heaven on earth

It’s here, it’s here, it’s here.” 

Some artists steel us with joy, that radical, underrated emotion. Listen to “Spring” from The Seasons, Haydn’s 1801 oratorio based on James Thomson’s poem. But some are uncomfortable with art as celebration. For them, it’s too serious to squander on mere praise and delight. Consider the woodblock prints that make up Katsushika Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, including “Red Fuji in Fine Weather.” Hokusai gives us the mountain at dawn in late summer or early fall. 

Davis’ friend, Edgar Bowers, shared some of his tastes. Bowers saw an exhibition of Thirty-six Views and answered with “Thirteen Views of Santa Barbara,” a poem in fourteen sections and an epilogue. Bowers acquired a Hokusai print and it appears on the cover of his Collected Poems (1997). “The Beach” is the fourth section of “Thirteen Views”: 

“In spring, we fish for halibut. In summer,

When grunion spawn at midnight in the surf,

We look for them on the sand to throw them back.

In winter, from the point, we cast beyond

The breakers to where bass feed. Solar age

And mythic distance turn round the point’s ellipse.

Earth is dark. Air darkens. The moon is white.

Then, as if I were there, I watch us here,

Immensities of purpose barely visible

Intent upon the message in the line

Startlingly taut with sudden gravity,

Muscle and bone of the reflected light.” 

Bowers likewise prized Haydn, and especially Mozart, “who lives still.” Here is “From J. Haydn to Constanze Mozart (1791),” from his first collection, The Form of Loss (1956): 

“Incredibly near the vital edge of tears,

I write, Constanze, having heard our loss.

Only the shape of memory adheres

To the most nearly perfect human pose

I hope to find, though mind and heart grow fierce,

Five times again as fierce as his repose. 

“The mind of most of us is trivial;

The heart is moved too quickly and too much.

He thought each movement that was animal,

And senses were the mind’s continual search

To find the perfect note, emotional

And mental, each the other one’s reproach. 

“With him as master, grief should be serene,

Death its own joy, and joy opposed by death,

What is made living by what should have been,

And understanding constant in its wrath

Within one life to fix them both the same,

Though no one can, unless it be in death. 

“Yet we who loved him have that right to mourn.

Let this be mine, that fastened on my eyes

I carry one small memory of his form

Aslant at his clavier, with careful ease,

To bring one last enigma to the norm,

Intelligence perfecting the mute keys.” 

In “The Mystery of Consciousness: A Tribute to the Poet Edgar Bowers,” a touching remembrance published in Poets and Writers after Bowers’ death on Feb. 4, 2000, Davis writes: 

“He is a hard man to describe, because he eschewed the eccentric and flamboyant, and was almost studiously `ordinary’ in everyday life. He had a deep distrust for the cult of `the poet’ and used to say trenchantly, `A man is only a poet when he is writing a poem.’”

`We Die of Words'

While talking not about his histories of Soviet crime but his poetry, Robert Conquest tells an interviewer that “even though you feel something very strongly, that doesn’t mean you can write about it. I mean you can try, but it often doesn’t come off. And I think there are quite a few bits that I should have cut from my own work. Maybe three-quarters of it.” The interviewer asks why and Conquest replies: “Well, for not getting it right. It’s very difficult to specify why something seems to have failed. I don’t believe in any preconceived method of judging poetry really. Just put it in a drawer for ten years, and then see if it still works.” [Fourteen on Form: Conversations with Poets, ed. William Baer, University Press of Mississippi, 2009.] 

If only more writers would resort to the drawer. Self-ruthlessness is always admirable in a writer. Last weekend, before he consumed half a day taking the SAT, I told my twelve-year-old: “Writing is rewriting.” Politely, he said nothing, but I believe it more strongly than ever. Spontaneity is approximately the opposite of solid, logical, reasonably honest prose and poetry. I thought of the lines from Conquest’s “George Orwell” (Arias from a Love Opera, 1969): 

“We die of words. For touchstones he restored

The real person, real event or thing.” 

Elsewhere, Conquest praises Orwell for his “principle of real, rather than ideological, honesty,” and says “Orwell represented honesty more than anything else. That doesn’t mean that he doesn't sometimes make some rather foolish remarks, or that people, whatever their principles are, don’t lapse sometimes.” As I’m reading Orwell’s essays again, I note the lack of flash, his dedication to the plain style, to not letting fancy prose get in the way of the “real person, real event or thing.” At a book fair in downtown Cleveland in 1969 I bought the recently published four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. I had already read Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four in school and disliked them intensely (static and idea-driven, like the science fiction I had renounced a few years earlier), but the non-fiction attracted me. Mr. Sammler’s Planet, serialized in The Atlantic Monthly in November-December 1969, cinched it. When Bellow’s Mr. Sammler gives a talk at Columbia University and cites Orwell approvingly, a bearded heckler in the audience shouts: “Orwell was a fink. He was a sick counterrevolutionary. It’s good he died when he did.” I love Orwell’s line from “Why I Write” (which also includes, as Conquest says, “some rather foolish remarks”): 

“So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.”

`Why Did Nancy Feel Any Loyalty to Bill Sykes?'

Songwriter, littérateur and “Apostle of Pep” Eddie Cantor (1892-1964), né Edward Israel Iskowitz, writes in the second of his two autobiographies, Take My Life (1957):

“A few nights after we got to Boston he started talking to me about literature. Books were the keys to another world; you didn’t know anything until you’d start to read. He went over to one of the big trunks and flipped back the lid. Not a thing in it but books! What he was looking for wasn’t in that trunk, so he flipped back the lid of the next one, fished out a copy of Oliver Twist and gave it to me. The next night when we got back after the show and had ordered up some food, he sat and questioned me about what I’d read. `Just why did Nancy feel any loyalty to Bill Sykes?’”

Cantor’s tutor in 1917 is W.C. Fields. The student announces “Night school had begun,” and outlines the syllabus: Les Misérables, more Dickens, Dumas and George Eliot, accompanied by “discussing them with Professor Fields.” One of Fields’ biographers, Simon Louvish, describes the comedian as “a diligent autodidact” and reproduces a speech by Mr. Micawber, the role Fields played in George Cukor’s 1935 film of David Copperfield:

“`Under the impression,’ said Mr. Micawber, `that your peregrinations in the metropolis have not as yet been extensive, and that you might have some difficulty in penetrating the arcana of the Modern Babylon in the direction of the City Road, in short,’ said Mr. Micawber, in another burst of confidence, `that you might lose yourself—I shall be happy to call this evening, and install you in the knowledge of the nearest way.’” 

Pure Fieldsian persiflage, of course, spoken in 1850, thirty years before the comedian was born William Claude Dukenfield in Darby, Penn. Cantor reminds us that Fields “never had formal schooling,” and was working in vaudeville as a professional juggler by age fifteen. For him and millions of others, the novels of the nineteenth century contributed to his moral education. No one is more reliably, consolingly funny than Fields. Go here and here for clips from his best film, It’s a Gift (1934). And go here to read a story I wrote almost twenty years ago about Paul Kuhn, who did the best impression of Fields (and Oliver Hardy, among others) I’ve ever seen.

 

Fields was born on this date, Jan. 29, in 1880, and died on Christmas Day 1946. Another great comedian, Anton Chekhov, was also born on this date, in 1860.

"Let Nature Never Be Forgot'

My wife hired a landscaper to survey our gardens and make suggestions for care and maintenance. He’s the same guy who advised the previous owners of our house on what to plant and where to plant it. Listening to him was a pleasure. In a broad, non-academic Texas drawl he sang the names, Latin and common, of almost every plant in the yard. He cooed at some of them: “Oh, she’s pretty. Just look at her.” He ordered us to promptly dispose of others: “You get rid of her. You don’t need her.” Every plant in his lexicon is feminine: “She’s a beauty.” I liked him for another reason: He wasn’t too proud to ask the meaning of words he didn’t know. I described a yard crew’s performance as “perfunctory.” “What’s that mean?” I told him and he said, “I like that. I’m gonna use that.” He had the same reaction when I used “epiphyte” to describe the ball moss, Tillandsia recurvata, that grows on the campus oaks. He knew “bromeliad” but welcomed the new designation. 

Best of all, he endorsed my “philosophy” of gardening – an artful mingling of wild and domesticated. I’ve never cared for the extremes of chaos or museum-like micro-management. Ed proved himself a modified classicist: “You want things tidy but not too tidy.” When he returns in a few weeks, I may suggest he read Alexander Pope’s “Epistle IV, To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington” (lines 47-56): 

“To build, to plant, whatever you intend,
To rear the Column, or the Arch to bend,
To swell the Terras, or to sink the Grot;
In all, let Nature never be forgot.
But treat the Goddess like a modest fair,
Nor over-dress, nor leave her wholly bare;
Let not each beauty ev'ry where be spy'd,
Where half the skill is decently to hide.
He gains all points who pleasingly confounds
Surprises, varies, and conceals the Bounds.”

`They Retreat Because They Are Excluded'

A poet is fact-minded, mathematical and harsh. He is musical, satirical and contemptuous of cant. He is not whimsical, dreamy or eager for approval. His politics and social conscience, or their absence, are irrelevant. He may write little but he must write well. Ben Jonson is a poet. So are Swift, Dickinson and J.V. Cunningham. So is R.L. Barth, who lauded Yvor Winters, his “Maestro,” as “hardheaded, realistic, past surprise.” In his own words, Winters ranks among the “tougher poets.” He is an anomaly. He never has enough readers. His readers must be adults. 

David Leightty, a poet, publisher and lawyer, dedicates “Terminal” to “AYW writing Forms of Discovery.” The “A” refers to Winters’ seldom-used first name, Arthur. Forms of Discovery is Winters’ final book, completed while he was dying of cancer and published in 1967. Its subtitle is inclusive: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English (1967). It and Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English (1969), edited by Winters and Kenneth Fields, I would commend to the nation’s high schools as a suitable introduction for students to our poetic tradition. Here’s is Leightty’s “Terminal”: 

“Your frail flesh posed the impasse you must face—

Your life’s strength could just see this last work through.

Greatness, a master who would brook no grace,

Made your last breath stand wager for the true. 

“You culled your wisdom for one final look,

Cast final judgment on both foe and friend,

Bartered your life to consummate this book,

And entered knowing to the utter end.” 

Though embattled even during his lifetime, before the collapse of most critical standards, Winters was influential as teacher, critic and poet. His loosely grouped “Stanford School,” including Janet Lewis, Cunningham, Edgar Bowers, Helen Pinkerton, Catherine Davis, Turner Cassity and Thom Gunn, wrote most of the best American poetry of the last eighty years. Of course, most of their work remains proudly unfashionable. Another former Winters student, the late Donald Justice, judged him “a master obscured by history.” In the essay from Forms of Discovery titled “The Plain Style Reborn,” Winters writes: 

“During the Romantic movement a great deal of sentimental nonsense was written about the isolation of the artist, and the nonsense usually verges on self-pity; there is a trace of self-pity in Cunningham's poems `Envoi’ and `Forgiveness.’ The fact remains, however, that the artist, if he is really an artist, is really isolated, and his personal life in this respect is a hard one. There are few people with whom he can converse freely without giving offense or becoming angry. It is no accident that so many great writers have sooner or later retreated from society; they retreat because they are excluded.” 

Winters died forty-five years ago this past Friday, on Jan. 25, 1968, at age sixty-seven.

`The Fascinating Subject of Wood'

“Scraps accumulate and can add up to an education.”

So writes a reader commenting on a recent post. He goes on to cite Kierkegaard, whose thinking baffles me, but adds: “Chesterton, the extraordinary writer of the ordinary, titled an essay collection Tremendous Trifles.” Now he has my attention. The volume is a gathering of columns Chesterton wrote for the Daily News between 1902 and 1909. Just days before I had reread one of its essays, “What I Found in My Pocket,” in which Chesterton describes being confined “in a third-class carriage for a rather long journey.” Our twenty-first-century equivalent is a lengthy, crowded but solitary cross-country flight in an airliner. Chesterton writes: 

“Now I deny most energetically that anything is, or can be, uninteresting. So I stared at the joints of the walls and seats, and began thinking hard on the fascinating subject of wood.” 

Most of us on a journey bring something to read. Now the interior of passenger jets glows softly with light emitted by e-books and laptop screens. It’s a pleasantly muted effect when the window screens have been closed, restful and contemplative, and I turn on the overhead light and read a conventional book of paper and cardboard. There’s little wood to ponder in a 737. Chesterton says he turns for diversion to the contents of his own pockets: “I was carrying about with me an unknown treasury.” He finds tram tickets on which are printed advertisements for “some kind of pill,” which he proceeds to read as “a small but well-chosen library.” 

Next he pulls out a pocket-knife, an object calling for “a thick book full of moral meditations all to itself.” When I was seven years old, there was nothing in the world I wanted more than a pocket knife. It represented adulthood, masculinity and independence. Chesterton meditates on metallurgy, human aggression, warfare and the Industrial Revolution: “For the knife is only a short sword; and the pocket-knife is a secret sword.” Then he pulls out a box of matches, representing “fire, which is stronger even than steel, the old, fierce female thing we all love, but dare not touch.” And then a piece of chalk, in which he sees “all the art and all the frescoes of the world,” and a coin, which suggests “all government and order since the world began.” 

Chesterton’s point is simple: Professing boredom ought to be shameful. It amounts to an admission of mental poverty and gratitude. T.S. Eliot claimed most of the trouble in the world was caused by people who want to be important. I would add a corollary: Most of the people in the world who want to be important have convinced themselves they are bored and that life is boring. Existence disappoints them and the world has failed to entertain them sufficiently. They crave diversion, something to help them forget they are forever stuck with themselves. In his preface to Tremendous Trifles, Chesterton suggests: 

“Let us learn to write essays on a stray cat or a coloured cloud.”

`The Swearing of the Bargemen'

A syllabus made up solely of Robert Burton and his admirers -- Johnson, Sterne, Lamb, Coleridge, Keats, Melville, Beckett and Anthony Powell, among others – would rival any education a graduate school might promise. Burton contains multitudes -- Hamlet, Polonius and Laertes. Powell took the title of his first novel, Afternoon Men, from a passage in The Anatomy of Melancholy, and the narrator of A Dance to the Music of Time, Nick Jenkins, writes a biography of Burton. The final novel in that twelve-novel sequence, Hearing Secret Harmonies, closes with a savory catalog lifted from the Anatomy, beginning like this: 

“I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged, in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c., daily musters and preparations, and suchlike, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms,” and so on, for another two-hundred words. In an essay on Burton from 1977, collected in Miscellaneous Verdicts: Writings on Writers 1946-1989, Powell writes: 

“At Oxford, when plagued with melancholy, Burton, who seems always to have enjoyed a joke, used to go down to the bridge over the river, and listen to the bargemen swearing at each other. That would always make him laugh, and at once feel better.” 

The Anatomy is judged a forbidding volume – oversized, endlessly digressive and allusive, interlarded with lengthy borrowing in Latin and Greek. All true, and that’s where the fun only begins. Both Burton and the bargemen make regular appearances in this self-revealing book. The author is perfectly aware of his effect even on modern readers. (The book was an immediate bestseller when published in 1621, and has seldom gone out of print.) He is writing an anatomy and, simultaneously, a parody of anatomies, any human striving after universal knowledge. The first edition totaled almost nine-hundred pages, and Burton published five revisions, each time adding to the bulk. 

When Lamb writes of Burton, he speaks of a cherished friend. Elia calls him “the fantastic great old man,” and senses a spiritual kinship in their mingling of melancholy and good humor. In “Mackery End, in Hertfordshire,” Lamb contrasts his taste in books with those of Bridget (Elia’s stand-in for Lamb’s sister Mary): 

“We are both great readers in different directions. While I am hanging over (for the thousandth time) some passage in old Burton, or one of his strange contemporaries, she is abstracted in some modern tale, or adventure, whereof our common reading-table is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies. Narrative teazes me.” 

The best-known endorsement of Burton is probably Johnson’s, as reported by Boswell: 

“Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is a valuable book. It is perhaps overloaded with quotation; but there is great spirit and a great power in what Burton says, when he writes from his own mind. It is the only book that ever took me out of bed two hours sooner than I wished to rise.” 

Johnson knew melancholy firsthand and he knew books. His enthusiasm for the Anatomy suggests he found in it consolation, solace almost medicinal. In some men, humor and heartbreak must mingle. In Section III, Member I, Subsection II, of the Anatomy, “Symptoms or Signs in the Mind,” Burton writes: 

“And though they laugh many times, and seem to be extraordinary merry (as they will by fits), yet extreme lumpish again in an instant, dull and heavy, semel et simul, merry and sad, but most part sad.” 

Burton died on this date, Jan. 25, in 1640, age sixty-two. Addressing the rumor that Burton may have hanged himself, Powell writes: 

“Such an act might certainly have fitted in with Burton’s sometimes black humour, but I feel the call of listening once again to the swearing of the bargemen would somehow have prevented that.”

`Concentrated and Nutty'

On this date, Jan. 24, in 1854, Thoreau visited Worcester, Mass. In a brief journal entry, he reports: “A very cold day.” He walked six miles with a friend. The forest, he notes, is less thick than in Concord: “No dark pines in the horizon.” Here, in a separate paragraph, is the part that makes me laugh: 

“De Quincey's `Historical and Critical Essays’ I have not read (2 vols.). Saw a red squirrel out.” 

At the risk of stifling the humor, intentional and otherwise, let’s take a closer look. The De Quincey volumes were published in 1853 by Ticknor, Reed and Field of Boston, as were the two volumes of Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers. On the title pages of both, De Quincey is identified as “author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Etc. Etc.” Historical and Critical Essays was acquired by the Concord Public Library, where Thoreau probably saw it. Of the English Romantics, De Quincey and his narcotic reveries would seem among the least likely to interest the abstemious Thoreau. On Sept. 8, 1851, he sniffs in his journal: 

“De Quincey & Dickens have not moderation enough. They never stutter. They flow too readily.” 

Two weeks earlier on Aug. 22, Thoreau makes similar observations at greater length, referring again to stuttering: 

“It is the fault of some excellent writers--De Quincey's first impressions on seeing London suggest it to me--that they express themselves with too great fullness and detail. They give the most faithful, natural, and lifelike account of their sensations, mental and physical, but they lack moderation and sententiousness. They do not affect us by an intellectual earnestness and a reserve of meaning, like a stutterer; they say all they mean. Their sentences are not concentrated and nutty.” 

This is critically shrewd and self-revealing. There’s a gassiness about De Quincey’s prose, an inflated vagueness perhaps abetted by his drug consumption. He was notably prolific, cranking out vast quantities of journalism. The Works of Thomas De Quincey, published between 2000 and 2003 by Pickering and Chatto, runs to twenty-one volumes, and that doesn’t include his letters.  One thinks of “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” and a few passages from the Confessions. The rest, for this reader, is a blur. Thoreau continues in the same entry: 

“Sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them, which do not merely report an old, but make a new, impression; sentences which suggest as many things and are as durable as a Roman aqueduct: to frame these, that is the art of writing. Sentences which are expensive, towards which so many volumes, so much life went; which lie like boulders on the page, up and down or across; which contain the seed of other sentences, not mere repetition, but creation; which a man might sell his grounds and castles to build. If De Quincey had suggested each of his pages in a sentence and passed on, it would have been far more excellent writing. His style is nowhere kinked and knotted up into something hard and significant, which you could swallow like a diamond, without digesting.” 

Of course, Thoreau is describing his own best prose, most of which is scattered like acorns on a crust of snow throughout his journals. That’s one of the things I like about the 1854 entry quoted at the top: “Saw a red squirrel out.” That is “concentrated and nutty.”

`The Memory of Their Meaning Never Stops'

The first book I wrote was a collection of potted biographies of the American presidents. I was nine and the last president included, the one then in office, was John F. Kennedy. My primary source was a pleasingly plump little paperback, Facts About the Presidents. In my book, each chief executive earned a page of his own. I wrote on ruled note paper and bound it in a three-ring binder. Even then, I didn’t have publication in mind. The format was simple: birth, important events, death – life reduced to its public essentials. Len Krisak learned about the presidents at a young age from bubblegum cards (perhaps including this one). In “Presidents Cards, 1958” he writes: 

“…I wonder that so much

Of value came from tacky, corny props

That helped me on whatever path I took.

The memory of their meaning never stops

For one who conned them like a history book.

But more alive than even they themselves,

The parents, scraping by, who for their son

Once claimed these men from supermarket shelves.

Who knew? Who’ll ever know what they have done?” 

My parents were not well educated but they seemed to assume that toys ought to have a pedagogical purpose. Like Krisak, I remember presidential minutiae and can recite their names in order, like a poem. Grover Cleveland’s second term always sounds like a mistake, a typo in memory (years later I interviewed his great- and great-great-grandsons). Because of a plastic jigsaw puzzle of the United States, their names, shapes and capitals are inscribed in memory. The card game Authors taught me the faces and vital stats of Longfellow and Louisa May Alcott. My brother and I collected Civil War cards, as much for the gore (“Painful Death”) as the history. 

The long-term result is a gift for winning at Trivial Pursuits, but more importantly the assumption that education is unending, informal and cobbled together from unlikely scraps ("tacky, corny props"). It has little or nothing to do with accumulating degrees or even showing up for class. Autodidacts start young.

`The Vast Uncertainties and Togetherness of the World'

As a reward for reading books, my nine-year-old’s teacher gave him a coupon for a free pizza, and at lunchtime on Monday I took him to the restaurant to redeem it. I’d forgotten about the presidential inauguration but there it was on the wall-mounted television. While we waited for the pizza, a woman bellowed “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” and Richard Blanco delivered “One Today,” the inaugural poem. Blanco has the decency not to lineate his words in an attempt to smuggle in prose. It is prose. Stylistically, his lineage can be traced to the Whitman/Sandburg/Thomas Wolfe School of Bombast. He delivered his blarney with great sincerity. Imagine these words intoned with a straight (or gay) face:

“My face, your face, millions of faces in morning’s mirrors,
each one yawning to life, crescendoing into our day:
pencil-yellow school buses, the rhythm of traffic lights,
fruit stands: apples, limes, and oranges arrayed like rainbows begging our praise.”

“Pencil-yellow school buses” made my nine-year-old laugh. Of course, it would have been disingenuous of a reader or citizen to expect a poem, not posturing and pieties, on such an occasion. The same thing happened four years ago (go here and here). Much has been made of Blanco being Cuban-American (and gay), but ethnic pride is no guarantee of artistic gifts. Talent cannot be grandfathered in. Blanco’s parents fled Castro’s Cuba in 1968, briefly settled in Spain where Blanco was born, and then moved to New York City. He is an American.

I’m reading the work of another fugitive from Communism, Norman Manea, a Jew born in 1936 who spent time in a Nazi concentration camp and was forced out of Ceaușescu’s Romania in 1986. Recently he published The Fifth Impossibility: Essays on Exile and Language (Yale University Press, 2012). In “Another Genealogy,” Manea writes of “identity” and “entity” (the latter he defines as “what is left when we are alone”):

“…with both identity and entity, the particular premise or the main imprint of our biography (family, religion, persecution, victimhood, professional distinction, etc.) plays an important role. For are we not only the product of a family, religion, country, community, school, profession, etc. Are we not, in the end, the result of our readings, the product of our bibliography as well as our biography?”

If so, Blanco has a lot of reading to catch up on. Manea suggests, among others, Aristotle, Cervantes, Spinoza, Shakespeare and Darwin. Of our reading he writes:

“It’s an artificial but important genealogy that competes as well as cooperates with the natural one in structuring our personality, in shaping our options, our beliefs and projects. It expresses our need for something beyond our too-human limitations, our family, religion, territorial, linguistic narrowness, something that exposes us to the vast uncertainties and togetherness of the world.”

`And Suddenly -- Sparks!'

Reading Chekhov again. His stories, like Kipling’s, never lose flavor and never disappoint. They grow as we grow or, rather, we grow into them, like clothing handed down from an older sibling when we’re kids. As we bring more experience to them, their elasticity accommodates us, and we come to understand the experience and the story more deeply. We trust we’ll never outgrow them. “Peasants,” from 1897, is about thirty pages long in the Constance Garnett translation (The Witch and Other Stories, 1918). It’s about Nikolay Tchikildyeev, a waiter in Moscow who becomes mysteriously ill and expects to die. Through it runs a seam of Chekhovian comedy: 

“His legs went numb and his gait was affected, so that on one occasion, as he was going along the corridor, he tumbled and fell down with a tray full of ham and peas. He had to leave his job.” 

Since last reading “Peasants,” I’ve learned something about the comedy of ill health, and I’ve renewed my appreciation for Chekhov’s narrative economy. While still in the first paragraph, Tchikildyeev leaves Moscow and returns to his native village, Zhukovo. “Peasants” is not protest literature, despite the title. Chekhov writes about people, not classes or case studies. Here’s a paragraph from late in the story that mingles reportage, comedy and satire: 

“On Elijah’s Day they drank, at the Assumption they drank, at the Ascension they drank. The Feast of the Intercession was the parish holiday for Zhukovo, and the peasants used to drink then for three days; they squandered on drink fifty roubles of money belonging to the Mir, and then collected more for vodka from all the households…Kiryak was fearfully drunk for three whole days; he drank up everything, even his boots and cap, and beat Marya so terribly that they had to pour water over her.” 

Vodka quietly suffuses the story but “Peasants” is not a temperance tract. Books have probably been written about vodka and the way it permeates Russian literature, especially in Dostoevsky. In my personal mythology, vodka is the quintessential intoxicant, pure, insidiously effective and corrosive of mind and body. A man will give up everything for it. In my family when I was a boy, the drinks of choice were the makings of a boilermaker, beer and whisky, known as “beer and a bump.” Vodka came later and seemed exotic in its colorless, odorless potency. 

Last May in Poland, I attended a family wedding. The reception in a country inn lasted two days. On the tables, supplementing the kegs of beer and carafes of wine, the young waiters and waitresses set up cases of quarts of vodka. They looked like condiments. Wedding celebrants, most of them Poles and Germans, drank rivers of vodka by the shot. I saw enormous quantities consumed, and much dancing and singing and general carousing but no fights or other melodramas. The Poles have a lot of practice, and for centuries the argument over who invented vodka, Poles or Russians, has raged. The Russians contend that the very name derives from voda, their word for water. The Poles counter that wodka is rooted in woda, Polish for water. Both pose sold claims, etymologically and culturally. In another story, “The Siren,” Chekhov, in the voice of a court stenographer, lovingly anatomizes the etiquette of Russian vodka consumption. Experienced consumers will nod their heads: 

“…when you sit down you should immediately put a napkin around your neck and then, very slowly, reach for the carafe of vodka. Now you don't pour the dear stuff into any old glass ... oh no! You must pour it into an antediluvian glass made of silver, one which belonged to your grandfather, or into a pot-bellied glass bearing the inscription `Even Monks Imbibe!’ And you don't drink the vodka down right away. No, sir. First you take a deep breath, wipe your hands, and glance up at the ceiling to demonstrate your indifference. Only then do you raise that vodka slowly to your lips and suddenly -- sparks! They fly from your stomach to the furthest reaches of your body.”

`I Could Scarce Trust Myself With Myself'

The doctor, a formal gentleman, son of a surgeon in Pakistan, wearing pressed charcoal-gray trousers and matching vest with a tightly knotted tie the color of lapis lazuli, asked, holding a stethoscope against my back, “And when, sir, do you plan to retire?” Perhaps he asked because he had noticed my age in the file – recently sixty. Perhaps because his father, he had already told me, is still making rounds in his seventies. I judge my new cardiologist to be a man in his mid-forties, with a smoothly youthful face that contrasts with his military bearing. Amiable but formal, a man steadfastly conscious of his status as a physician and mine as a patient, but without arrogance. 

No one had ever inquired after my retirement plans, and I’ve given them little thought. I remember men of my father’s generation talking about Florida or Arizona as though they were the Promised Land, milk and honey after decades in the desert of Forty-Hours-a-Week. I’ve had lousy jobs but never pined after a life of beer and fishing. I enjoy the scaffolding a job provides, the regularity, camaraderie and purpose, the opportunity it gives me to meet smart people. No job is my life but a jobless life seems a little dreary. I’ve free-lanced, and it’s not for me. I told the doctor I had no retirement plans and he smiled: “Excellent. I share your feelings. It will keep you alive. I cannot imagine a life of leisure.” His comportment suggested as much. He seemed to enjoy the minutiae of my case (more than I, in fact), and found pleasure in our conversation. He was gratified when I asked about Pakistan. He spoke of his homeland with the doleful reverence of a jilted lover. He said: “My country has a gift for suffering.” 

I suggested he read Charles Lamb’s “The Superannuated Man” in Last Essays of Elia. He had me write down the title. In it, Lamb describes his retirement after thirty-three years from the Accountant’s Department of the East India Company:

 

“For the first day or two I felt stunned, overwhelmed. I could only apprehend my felicity; I was too confused to taste it sincerely. I wandered about, thinking I was happy, and knowing that I was not. I was in the condition of a prisoner in the old Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty years' confinement. I could scarce trust myself with myself. It was like passing out of Time into Eternity -- for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have his Time all to himself.”

`Not the Same as What's Important'

I can’t shake the sense that talking about one’s health, good or bad, even with a doctor, is sometimes indecent. We’re egotists. Our ailments must surely fascinate the world, and as we complain we count on the emotional blackmail embedded in our words: They’ve gotta listen. I’m sick!  Sometimes I don’t listen. I’m too preoccupied with my own problems. David Myers writes: “Another bad report from my oncologist, another `last resort’ drug kicked.” I read this on returning from a visit to my cardiologist, the one who catheterized my heart a week earlier. My news was good – no blockages, no scarring, no further invasive measures, at least for now. What are the ethics of sharing good news with a friend who just heard bad news? Which choice – to tell or not to tell -- is more egocentric? I don’t know. I told David. He called it “fantastic news” and moved on. Are we a couple of alter kockers descending further into self-regard? Was David alluding to this as he silently cited Yeats?: 

“An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress.” 

“Soul clap its hands and sing”: I thought of the Shakers and Hasidim. David deploys another unannounced allusion: “It’s true that cancer concentrates the mind wonderfully, but it’s also wonderful just what the mind prefers to concentrate upon.” He counts on us recognizing the nod to Boswell quoting Johnson: “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” The context of Johnson’s remark is complicated (go here for a brief explanation). David’s conclusion helps dispel the suggestion of sentimentality and self-pity, and obliquely answers my earlier question about ethics: 

“While the inessential is stripped away, it turns out that what’s essential is not the same as what’s important. The essential is what makes soul clap hands and sing, and no counsel to get serious in the face of death stands much chance of being heard over the essential racket.”

`The Ultimate Result of All Ambition'

Writing of her friend Edgar Bowers, Barbara Bundy says the poet was “intimate with the strangeness of existence and the mysterious forces of being that bring us to fullness and emptiness,” and that he was “always welcoming of strangers, perhaps because he was so familiar with the ultimate stranger within.” Her syntax implies the qualities are related. Some of us, reminded of our homelessness in the world, scorn others in a similar state. Some, like Bowers, renew their solidarity. In this, he resembles Dr. Johnson, who turned his modest quarters into an informal homeless shelter, taking in a freed slave and an irascible blind woman. London snickered when he rescued a homeless prostitute, and Boswell reports him saying: “A man unconnected is at home everywhere; unless he may be said to be at home no where.” 

My brother is selling the house we grew up in. I wasn’t quite three when we moved in, in 1955, the year of his birth. My earliest memory is the grass in the neighbor’s backyard resembling a field of wheat. I haven’t lived there in forty years. I’ve never paid the property taxes or called the plumber, but the place remains as vivid as a road map. I still think of a real house as one built of brick. Upstairs in my room I read Hamlet and The Adventures of Augie March for the first time, and clipped Eric Hoffer’s column from the newspaper. When I walked in the back door on Nov. 22, 1963, I saw my mother, two rooms away, crying in front of the television. Even in my alienated days it stayed, in some primal sense, home. Bowers included “Dedication for a House” in his first book, The Form of Loss (1956): 

“We, who were long together homeless, raise

Brick walls, wood floors, a roof, and windows up

To what sustained us in those threatening days

Unto this end. Alas, that this bright cup

Be empty of the care and life of him

Who should have made it overflow its brim.” 

Growing up means learning to carry home around with us, like nomads. That strangers may soon be living in our old house is inevitable and right. Welcome! Johnson writes in The Rambler #68:      

“To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution."

`A Little More Populous With Visionary Shapes'

Our nine-year-old’s fourth-grade teacher confirmed what we already knew and hardly thought worth mentioning: David reads a lot of books and he reads them simultaneously, greedily and without confusion. “Just like his Dad,” my wife added during our parent-teacher conference. The teacher is young and more accustomed to cajoling students into picking up even one book. Day after day, she noticed David pulling stacks of them from his backpack. “How’d you do it?” she asked in genuine wonder. “How’d you get him to want to read?” There’s no mystery. “In a word,” I said, “read.” “Oh,” she said, a little disappointed with our low-tech strategy. 

I’m an exception to my own method, of course. Mine was not a reading family but neither did it actively discourage the consumption of books. Operating on the principle of contrariety, I did the opposite of my parents’ example and read like a fiend. Another Ohio native also started young. William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was born in Martins Ferry, across the Ohio River from Wheeling, W.V. The future novelist and friend to Henry James and Mark Twain was the son of a newspaper editor and printer. In one of his volumes of autobiography, Years of My Youth (1916), Howells writes: 

“[My father] was, as I have divined more and more, my guide in that early reading which widened with the years, though it kept itself preferably for a long time to history and real narratives. He was of such a liberal mind that he scarcely restricted my own forays into literature, and I think that sometimes he erred on that side; he may have thought no harm could come to me from the literary filth which I sometimes took into my mind [not pornography; more likely the nineteenth-century equivalent of so-called graphic novels], since it was in the nature of sewage to purify itself.” 

Among the books he read as a boy, Howells remembers Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels and Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque – all of which I read as a boy. In an earlier memoir, My Year in a Log Cabin (1893), Howells describes a boyhood epiphany I envy because I remember nothing comparable: 

“Our barrels of paper-covered books were stowed away in that loft, and overhauling them one day I found a paper copy of the poems of a certain Henry W. Longfellow, then wholly unknown to me; and while the old grist-mill, whistling a wheezing to itself, made a vague music in my ears, my soul was filled with this new, strange sweetness. I read the `Spanish Student’ there, and the `Coplas de Manrique,’ and the solemn and ever-beautiful `Voices of the Night.’” 

So much for the backwardness of rural Ohio some 170 years ago. Howells continues his account of self-education: 

“There were other books in those barrels which I must have read also, but I remember only these, that spirited me again to Spain, where I had already been with [Washington] Irving, and led me to attack seriously the old Spanish grammar which had been knocking about our house ever since my father bought it from a soldier of the Mexican War.” 

Boys (and probably girls) aren’t natural-born scholars or artists. They’re more like freelance explorers, and books and bicycles have equal claims on their attention. Howells continues: 

“But neither these nor any other books made me discontented with the small-boy’s world about me. They made it a little more populous with visionary shapes, but that was well, and there was room for them all. It was not darkened with cares, and the duties in it were not many.” 

[Think of the other worthy writers born in Ohio: Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Berger, Ambrose Bierce, Hart Crane, Ulysses S. Grant and Dawn Powell.]

`Burials of the Better Sort in England'

“A library is the mind's way to three or four good sentences.” 

If we’re persistent, that is, and fortunate. I’ve visited libraries, public and private, barren of good sentences and good sense. Once I spent a night in a house with hundreds of books and nothing to read. I looked at boating magazines from the nineteen-fifties and consoled myself with illustrations by the cartoonist Basil Wolverton. 

The author of the aphorism above, David P. Gontar, is being helpfully cynical. He gives us a literary corollary to Gresham’s law: Bad books, like bad money, drive out the good stuff. Good fortune in the guise of Mike Gilleland led me to William Carew Hazlitt (1834-1913), the industrious grandson of the essayist and critic. In 1905, Hazlitt published the two-volume Faiths and Folklore: A Dictionary of National Beliefs, Superstitions and Popular Customs, etc.  The book is a reworking of Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain (1777) by John Brand and Sir Henry Ellis. 

I borrowed the Fondren Library copy of Hazlitt’s revised edition (Reeves and Turner, 83, Charing Cross Road) which is browning and foxed, and apparently hasn’t circulated since 1964. The stark, black-on-white bookplate says only “Charles Wells.” It’s a grab bag of marginally scholarly lore, much of it possessing the voyeuristic fascination of Ripley’s Believe It or Not and the Guinness Book of World’s Records. Good Sentence #1, from the entry for “Books”: 

“Books, by way of funeral tokens, used to be given away at the burials of the better sort in England.” 

Good Sentence #2, from “Treacle” (chosen for its absolute absence of information, a formerly rare writerly gift): 

“A supposed universal antidote and specific, made in various ways, and originally, of course, unconnected with treacle.” 

Good Sentence #3, from “Monitor Lizard”: 

“The inhabitant of the Nile district and of the Transvaal is popularly supposed to utter a sort of warning in the shape of a hissing sound at the approach of a crocodile.” 

Good Sentence #4, taken not from Hazlitt’s book but from a newspaper clipping tucked between pages 384 and 385 in Volume II (“Mandrake”). The clipping has been dated (“8 Sept. 1915”) but the newspaper is not identified: 

“The kokil or Indian cuckoo is respected by the Hindus.” 

Gontar is correct. My mind has found its way to four good sentences. In another of his “Selected Aphorisms,” Gontar notes, “Our destiny:  to cross the sea of life on a raft of words.” We might add: “Our own and, more importantly, others’.”

`His Purest Happiness and Personal Freedom'

“Let’s withdraw;

And meet the time as it seeks us.” 

The simple words, all but one of a single syllable, are spoken by Cymbeline in his palace, Act IV, Scene 3. I passed over them in my rereading of the play last month. Often with Shakespeare, the brilliance is like wallpaper, everywhere and easy to overlook, but the words glow in isolation, removed from their dramatic context. Cymbeline suggests a principled dissent from the present, an abstaining from its temptations and corruptions. This is not quietism; rather, a strategic withdrawal accompanied by vigilance. A military man, the king of Britain, is speaking. It might be General Grant: advance when advanced upon. I thought of Cymbeline while reading a tweet on Monday from David Myers: 

“If there were a prize for the critic who is most out of step with the literary Zeitgeist, I would win it hands down.” 

It’s a boast, of course, and a good one. Some of us have withdrawn, if we ever belonged among them, from the company of the trendy writers, prize committees and workshop hacks who fancy themselves tastemakers and agents of perpetual revolution. Orwell called Dickens “a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.” He might have been thinking of David. I happened upon the lines from Cymbeline again while reading Stefan Zweig’s memoir, The World of Yesterday, in a new translation by Anthea Bell (Pushkin Press, 2009). Zweig uses the passage as his epigraph. Late in the book, in 1939, war is about to break out in Europe. Zweig is in England, where he fears, because he is Austrian, being treated as an enemy alien. He considers attending a PEN Club Congress in Stockholm, and writes: 

“But something odd in me refused to obey the dictates of reason and save myself. It was half defiance—I was not going to take to flight again and again, since Fate looked like following me everywhere—and half just weariness. `We’ll meet the time as it meets us,’ I said to myself, quoting Shakespeare. And if it does want to meet you, I told myself, then don’t resist. Close as you are to your sixtieth year, it can’t get at the best part of your life anyway, the part you have already lived. I stuck to that decision.” 

Zweig and his wife remained in England and then sailed to New York in 1940, and later to Brazil. On Feb. 23, 1942, shortly after Zweig delivered the manuscript of The World of Yesterday to his publisher, the couple committed suicide in their house in Petrópolis. In the note he left, Zweig writes: 

“But to start everything anew after a man’s 60th year requires special powers, and my own power has been expended after years of wandering homeless. I thus prefer to end my life at the right time, upright, as a man for whom cultural work has always been his purest happiness and personal freedom — the most precious of possessions on this earth.”

`Proceed With Daring Synapses'

“Not having read any Davenport before, where should I begin?”

So writes a reader commenting on a recent post devoted to the work of the late Guy Davenport. I’m not comfortable telling people what to read, and resent it when others issue bookish orders to me. Only in the reading life am I a libertarian. Rather than codify a Davenport curriculum, I’ll share some of my forty-year engagement with a writer who, through words alone, became my best teacher. He was passionately curious, learned and generous with what he knew. In his book-length poem Flowers and Leaves (1966), Davenport writes, in a characteristic parenthesis: “(Knowledge rusts / If the mind can’t love.)”

Davenport (1927-2005) was a prolific writer, but a careful one. None of his works is a vanity project, and all, even the least review or introduction, can be mined for gems. I don’t remember the first thing by him I read, perhaps an essay or story in a journal, though it may have been The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz (1963), a selection from the writings of the Swiss-born scientist and friend to Thoreau. In his thirty-page introduction, a sort of credo for all that followed, Davenport hints at his own sensibility:

“Agassiz was a major figure in nineteenth-century American culture, as much a part of our literary history as our scientific. Agassiz assumed that the structure of the natural world was everyone’s interest, that every community as a matter of course would collect and classify its zoology and botany. College students can now scarcely make their way through a poem organized around natural facts [this was half a century ago!]. Ignorance of natural history has become an aesthetic problem in reading the arts. Thoreau, though he wondered why the very dogs did not stop and admire turned maples, knew better what the American attitude was, and was to be, toward natural history. Nullity.” 

Davenport assumes the unity of knowledge, making no hard, mutually exclusive distinctions between science and art. Though he taught in universities for almost forty years, he had none of the academic’s dull, turf-defending over-specialization. He was no careerist. Rather, he was a teacher whose principal mode of teaching was writing. He couldn’t fathom a man who wasn’t excited by a magnolia tree in blossom or a passage in Ruskin. The centerpiece of his published work, its Rosetta stone, remains The Geography of the Imagination, an essay collection published in 1981 by North Point Press. On my shelves sit twenty-two volumes of Davenport’s work, with some overlap among them. Geography, inscribed by Guy the one time I met him (“18 June 1990”), threatens to fall apart from use. Some passages I’ve committed to memory strictly from familiarity. This is from “Ernst Machs Max Ernst”:         

“If I have a sensibility distinct from that of my neighbors, it is simply a taste, wholly artificial and imaginary, for distant plangencies and different harmonies in which I can recognize as a stranger a sympathy I could not appreciate at my elbow: songs of the Fulani, a ntumpan, male and female, of ceremonial elephant drums of the Asantehene, dressed in silk, under a more generous sun and crowding closer upon the symbolled and archaic embroidery of the skirts of God, the conversations of Ernst Mach and William James, Basho on the road to the red forests of the North, Sir Walter Scott at dinner with Mr. Hinze, his cat, sitting by his plate.” 

It’s the personal note that carries conviction, yet a reader could never mistake this for memoir. Some people, writing of themselves, write autobiographically in the banal sense: this happened, then this happened. Guy presents you with a core sample of his sensibility. “Distant plagencies” may show up as my epitaph. 

The side of Davenport’s accomplishments closest to my heart is the nonfiction. He was our supreme essayist. The fiction is less central for me, in part because Guy, like Borges, mingled fiction and essay. He was dismissive of his first story collection, Tatlin! (1974), judging it too wordy and explicit. Yet consider the final sentence of “The Dawn in Erewhon,” the final story: 

“On the earthday July twentieth, one thousand nine hundred and sixty-nine years after Omicron Ceti burst bright during a mighty conjunction of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars, the handsome, blue-eyed Command Pilot of the Eagle, Neil Armstrong, of Ohio, stepped with his left foot onto the dust of the moon.” 

Among my favorite Davenport stories: “On Some Lines of Virgil” (Eclogues, 1981); “Fifty-Seven Views of Fujiyama” (Apples and Pears, 1984); “Belinda’s World Tour” and “The Concord Sonata” (A Table of Green Fields, 1993).  The one book of Guy’s I reviewed during his life was The Balthus Notebook (Ecco Press, 1989). I clipped the review from the newspaper and mailed it to him (we had already been exchanging letters for more than a year), and he was politely pleased with what I had written. Looking back, I see it’s a feeble bit of writing but Guy was never less than gracious. In The Balthus Notebook you’ll find this corrective to theory-driven narcissism: 

“A work of art, like a foreign language, is closed to us until we learn how to read it. Meaning is latent, seemingly hidden. There is also the illusion that the meaning is concealed. A work of art is a structure of signs, each meaningful. It follows that a work of art has one meaning only. For an explicator to blur an artist’s meaning, or to be blind to his achievement, is a kind of treason, a betrayal. The arrogance of insisting that a work of art means what you think it means is a mistake that closes off curiosity [n.b.],  perception, the adventure of discovery.” 

Of few writers can we say to a novice: You can’t go wrong; start anywhere and enjoy yourself. Even Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus. In my experience, I always enjoy and learn something from Guy’s work, no matter how remote it may seem from my putative interests.  In “Ernst Mach Max Ernest,” writing of “the styles I find most useful to study” (Kenner, Mandelstam, Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, Pound, Charles Doughty), Guy writes: 

“All of these are writers who do not waste a word, who condense, pare down, and proceed with daring synapses.”